Digital Editions On The Rise, But Slowly, BPA Numbers Show44 percent of member brands now reporting digital circ.

BPA Worldwide’s latest six-month snapshot of where media company digital editions stand shows a healthy, but not spectacular 4-percentage point uptick in member publishers reporting electronic circulation.

BPA reported that for the six months ended Dec. 31, 2014, 44 percent of B-to-B and consumer brands it audits have digital editions. For the same period in 2013, 40 percent of those titles reported having electronic versions.

In all, 552 print brands reporting to BPA claimed digital circulation for that second-half 2014 period, 3.8 percent more than reported having a digital version in the first six months of 2014. That’s a little better growth rate than BPA found in 2013, when 3.3 percent more brands reported having digital editions in the second half (538) than in the year’s first half.

In terms of overall circulation, digital is showing slow, but steady growth, BPA data shows. In its August 10 release on the new 2014 numbers, BPA said digital accounts for 25.7 percent of all qualified circulation, up from 24 percent as of June 30, 2014, and 23.5 percent for the six months ending Dec. 31, 2013.

Among the top 25 BPA titles ranked by total digital circulation, digital as a percentage of total circulation ranged from a high of around 90 percent for those not exclusively digital down to around 34 percent. The leading digital titles in the most recent compilation were DuJour (an all digital publication), 3.3 million; PM Network (almost 389,000 electronic copies, a 6.4 percent increase over the prior period); Oracle (175,000 digital copies, up 1.6 percent); and IEEE Spectrum (175,000 digital, up 3 percent).